Michael Fine. M.D. is a family physician, who divides his time between practices in urban Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and rural Scituate, Rhode Island. He is the Physician Operating Officer of Hillside Avenue Family and Community Medicine, the largest family practice in Rhode Island, and Physician-in-Chief of the Rhode Island and Miriam Hospitals Departments of Family and Community Medicine, and Managing Director of the Rhode Island Family Physicians Access Alliance, the nation's first organization making prepaid, reduced fee for service primary care available to uninsured Rhode Islanders. He is Vice Chair of the Board of Crossroads RI, the State's major agency caring for Rhode Island's homeless, and Co-Chair of the Allied Advocacy Group for Integrated Primary Care. Fine is a Past-President of the Rhode Island Academy of Family Physicians, and was an Open Society Institute/George Soros Fellow in Medicine as a Profession 2000-2002.

Fine's professional life has been devoted to health care reform, and the care of underserved populations. He has served on a number of Legislative committees at the Rhode Island General Assembly; has been chair of the Primary Care Advisory Committee for the Rhode Island Department of Health, and sat on both the Urban Family Medicine Task Force of the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the National Advisory Council to the National Health Service Corps.

Dr Fine, is coauthor, with James Peters, to The Nature of Health (Radcliffe, 2007). The Nature of Health (www.thenatureofhealthbook.com) is the first health policy book since Medical Nemesis (Ivan Illich,1975) and Mirage of Health (Rene Dubos,1959) to consider the meaning of health as most people understand it, and to suggest the design a health care system that delivers the health people want.

Dr. Fine lives in Scituate, Rhode Island with his wife, Carol Levitt, M.D.(also a family physician), and their 2 children, Gabriel, 17, and Rosie,15.